Watching the videos before the start of White’s own show, we fill our minds with Black faces looking out of the video-screen frame, meeting our eyes, or seeming to connect with the unmoving paintings hanging around us. Whitney White’s Definition: An Installation Experience actually starts in this gallerylike foyer with a beautifully curated prologue, an exhibition of artworks and videos by (among others) Kenard Jackson and Cloteal Horne. The newly converted warehouse is a clean pocket in that gray particulate haze it’s gleaming and elegant, with a blonde-wood lobby staircase descending in big amphitheater jumps to a polished floor. The Mercury Store is in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the reeking Gowanus Canal and only steps from Third Avenue, where the air is heavy with asphalt fug. Installations create a sense of cosmic loneliness that’s rare in conventional drama, an art form which usually fills up every available cranny with bluster and presence. No one claims they’ll still be in the theatrical repertory after the recovery - they’re such a profligate use of resources and space. (Installations are environments in which an in-person audience encounters sound, sculpture, and other media, but never a living performer.) You don’t get the same advocacy for installations that you do for digital work. Will institutions keep producing online shows? Or is Zoom destined to be retired, filed alongside techniques like candlelight and dancing bears? But while conversation about digital rages, another pandemic method trundles quietly along: the installation. In theatrical discussions these days, artists debate digital performance.
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